


Interpersonal Mathematics

by PastelClark



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Developing Friendships, Gen, Gender Identity, Genderqueer Lance, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, Trans Pidge | Katie Holt, written for the Voltrans Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 10:57:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12297792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelClark/pseuds/PastelClark
Summary: “Really?” She looks to him in askance, the odd edges of nerves leaving her expecting more. “That’s it?” He shrugs, looking bemused, and she snorts. “…Did you seriously have no idea that entire time?”Lance throws up his hands, waving them about in a dramatic fashion. “I mean I knewsomethingwas up with you, but I didn’t necessarily think it was a gender thing! A person can have like...multiple things going on at once. And I was right! There was something—I just didn’t expect it to be as big as your family being kidnapped by aliens and you faking your entire identity, y’know?”Pidge rolls her eyes, ignoring the panging clangs that never quite go away ofyour family, your family, where is your family, Katie?“Yeah, alright. Fair enough.”(Or, in which Pidge is trans, damn wellknowsshe's trans, Lance has no idea what he is, and they both learn to handle the complexities of gender identity, friendship, and each other, in that order.)





	Interpersonal Mathematics

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Voltrans Zine ([tumblr](https://voltrans-zine.tumblr.com/)/[twitter](https://twitter.com/VoltransZine)). Now that preorders have finished, the mod has cleared participants to post their full pieces, so I'm delighted to share with you what _was_ my first Pidge POV piece, as of when I wrote it. It's what led me to fall properly in love with her POV  & fics centered around her and it was a blast to write.

Pidge would like to consider herself a fairly decisive person.

 

She would argue it’s part of her nature as a scientist. Outside of the realm of actual possibility (which, admittedly, has greatly expanded since entering Voltron), she’s not prone to daydream or fantasy. Why waste time considering things that could never feasibly happen when you could work towards a goal that was relatively graspable, after all? It’s just far more sensible.

 

Regardless, she’s never been much of one for dilly-dallying or the like when it comes down to it.

 

She is a scientist. A programmer. A paladin now, too, she supposes. And yes, a woman.

 

She was one of the quote-on-quote “early bloomers” in that particular discovery, as it might be called (or perhaps it might be better referred to a soul-searching type of decision? She supposes it depends on whom you ask, and their experience with the matter).

 

Either way, she’s always known what and who she was fairly quickly— from the time she was seven or eight, in the crawling, creeping sensations of _yes, this is what I’m meant to be_ , and the rather memorable occasion not long after where that young, dauntless, and stubbornly optimistic version of herself (before she grew up, before she saw the world) had marched out to Matt in the shoe store during their annual back to school shopping trip with bright purple, sparkly Velcro tie sneakers strapped firmly to her feet, and Matt had looked down and giggled in amused confusion. “I think those are meant for girls, buddy.”

 

“But I am a girl,” she’d said firmly, and Matt had blinked, just once, considering.

 

“Alright.” he’d said, and that’d been the end of it.

 

(Well…no, obviously, that wasn’t the _end_ of it, more like the beginning of an extremely long, arduous, and complicated process, but it makes an interesting marker point in her personal mental autobiography, if she does say so herself.)

 

Intellectually, of course, Pidge is vey much aware of the fact that some people are not so well decided and utterly sure in themselves. Such people waffle on their even most confident knowledge at times, their faith in their skill sets, on their own identity. They may be unwilling to decide such things permanently, or may lack faith in their own judgment, or simply not come into themselves in that capacity until much later.

 

It is not, however, a problem she has ever had much at all, excusing a few circumstances.

 

She simple does not have the _time_ , she thinks, to be so unconfident in her own abilities, her own instincts. Not then, as a child, when the world was young and new and fresh and she’d needed all the time she had just to explore it. And not now, when the very concept of the metaphorical world, or perhaps more accurately _universe_ , is vast and wide again in a whole new way, and there are so many people relying on her to keep her head on straight.

 

... _Especially_ given some of those people are her own family, and they don’t even know it yet.

 

Similarly, Pidge would consider herself a fairly quick judge of character. She can be surprised at the capacity of a person even yet, naturally, but she often finds her initial assessments are not incorrect. A decent example of this might be Allura: the princess has certainly grown on Pidge over time, and she’s come to appreciate what Allura offers in bravery and reckless strength in the face of her cause, but none of her acquired fondness of the princess has negated her initial assessment of an ice- cold warrior queen in training running away from her own past.

 

(She may not be royalty herself, or as in control of her emotions as Allura can be, but Pidge can with the utmost certainty recognize someone else fleeing from their own memories of what they have done, what they have let happen in their unplanned negligence. Allura let Altea burn while she slept, no matter how unwillingly, and Pidge had let her family be lost while she was thousands of miles away and could do nothing to prevent it. She can respect that they, at least, have that much in common in the unwanted guilt that rests on their shoulders.)

 

Point being, she can learn more about people like any other fallible being, but it’s _additional_ data points, not a revision of her original hypothesis. No matter how much her teammates may grow as people and she may, in turn, grow to understand them, they are still at their cores at least in part what she started out with— Shiro is still a boy-scout-hearted inspiration to everyone who looks at him, Keith is still a hotheaded maniac with an obsession for speed, and Hunk is still a well-meaning teddy bear with the come-and-go intellect of a genius when he’s interested in a subject.

 

…With…one exception: Lance. The outlier to the average of this little equation.

 

No matter what she does, Pidge cannot seem to figure out the enigmatic puzzle that is Lance, in all his odd-edged, hyperactive glory.

 

Really, it’d almost be insulting, if it wasn’t weirdly interesting in a kind of bored fascination way.

 

…If Pidge is being honest, her first impression of Lance is that of somewhere between an idiot and, as the so delicately crafted term goes, a _fuckboy._

 

Admittedly, her focus at the time isn’t exactly on breaking into the deep and meaningful parts of her teammates psyches. Or…much on her teammates at all, actually, but she thinks either way Lance’s attempt at something like a smooth and cool introduction wouldn’t have gone over well.

 

She simply isn’t a person for that kind of posturing—pretending such things is all in good fun, but putting on a false suave attitude in seriousness just makes something look stupid, in her personal opinion.

 

(She is sure Lance would disagree vehemently with that statement, but her point still stands.)

 

Over time, in being stuck with him in the close quarters that come with being a part of the same team at the Garrison, she reluctantly stretches her opinion of him to include a sentiment of something along the lines of _not overall a bad person_ , former points not withstanding, but it isn’t until Voltron that her feelings on the matter change much beyond that.

 

Finding Lance after the explosion that destroys the castle’s crystal is…a shock. A data point incongruent with her previous knowledge of him, which had never displayed such an aptitude for... Well. She’s not sure whether to call it self-sacrifice or a suicidal streak. Another one of those cases where it depends on who you ask, she supposes.

 

That said, pretty much everything up until that point is a shock. The entirety of rescuing Shiro, subsequently finding the Blue lion, arriving at the castle, and most everything that comes after it is one big no-sleep, adrenaline-run rush of _this can’t be real it isn’t feasibly possible but that hardly matters, survive this, move past this, they’ve got Matt and Dad you’ve got to **survive this.**_

 

And of course, in the aftermath, in turning the castle into her battleground and losing Rover and watching Haxus fall to his death and realizing that _yes, she has just killed someone to save her own skin and she’d do it again_ , it is easy to forget, to shuffle aside the anomaly of Lance in favor of so much new information to categorize, to reflect on.

 

(It is…odd, to look at her own picture of herself, in between the pieces that make up hacker and fighter and sister and all the other little snippets, and add _killer_ to that image. She’s always rather easily conceptualized humans as just giant strings of something like computer code, what else is DNA, after all, and to filter through her own and find the pieces of programming necessary for that kind of thing is an experience, to say the least.)

 

She doesn’t really give Lance a second thought until well after all that, after they’ve seen him out of the cryopod and plied him with food, and she realizes _yes, now, this is the moment_. She bares the hidden parts of her metaphorical code and corrects an assumption she’d let lie, even encouraged, to protect her identity as Pidge Gunderson over Katie Holt.

 

_Me. Pidge. Katie. Paladin. Woman._

 

On the one hand, their reactions are a relief. To have that assurance that, yes, they assumed she is a girl regardless, because body and voice and all the things not yet in her control do not define her. That her heart, her _being_ , is woman, and that is enough.

 

One the other, it’s frustrating. To know for all her work, all her sacrifice, all the times her skin itched and crawled and she wanted to shout this was _wrong_ , wrong name wrong pronouns wrong _life_ , was for naught. They saw through her ploy anyways.

 

In a way, Lance’s overdramatic reaction is gratifying. At least _someone_ had bought her disguise. Her efforts had not entirely been in vain. It isn’t until after that Pidge feels the numb worry in her tingling nerves and clammy hands as Lance side-eyes her on their walk back to their rooms, and that she wonders if his loud reaction had been for _that reason_.

 

(It is, admittedly, incongruent with what she knows of Lance, even admitting to the crueler aspects of her assessments of him, but fear is a curious thing, born from trial and error and superstition, and it is not always logical.)

 

“So you’re like—a girl?” he says, brash and unassuming and all the things that give Pidge a headache at the best of times. “A legit girl or…?”

 

She twitches, almost wanting to snap at him to define a _legit girl_ , but restrains herself. “ _Yes_ Lance, I can assure you I’m one hundred percent girl.”

 

“...Huh.” Lance blinks. “Alright. Cool.”

 

“Really?” She looks to him in askance, the odd edges of nerves leaving her expecting _more_. “That’s it?” He shrugs, looking bemused, and she snorts. “…Did you seriously have no idea that entire time?”

 

Lance throws up his hands, waving them about in a dramatic fashion. “I mean I knew _something_ was up with you, but I didn’t necessarily think it was a gender thing! A person can have like...multiple things going on at once. And I was right! There was something—I just didn’t expect it to be as big as your family being kidnapped by aliens and you faking your entire identity, y’know?”

 

Pidge rolls her eyes, ignoring the panging clangs that never quite go away of _your family, your family, where is your family, Katie?_ “Yeah, alright. Fair enough.”

 

“...I thought you might be trans, honestly,” Lance says after a pause, squinting at the ground. “Like you were clearly uncomfortable getting changed around other people and you were so _tiny_ for a dude so—“

 

“I _am_ trans,” Pidge says before she can think about it, and only afterwards doubles back and properly registers that Lance had meant he thought she was a trans _man_ , followed by the rather jarring realization that perhaps she hasn’t exactly made clear to the team that she isn’t…well. Cis. “I mean...”

 

(It isn’t technically their business, either way, she supposes, but she had _wanted_ to tell them. Had wanted to be honest in this very crucial piece of what made her herself.)

 

“Oh.” Lance stops in the hall. “…Oh! Okay, yeah, that…that makes sense, in retrospect.”

 

“...Yeah.”

 

“So is _everyone_ in your family just short then?”

 

She punches him in the side, ignoring his squeals of delighted laughter, and chases him down the hall yelling empty threats. And somewhere, in the mental files and folders of Pidge’s brain, the section on Lance reorders itself ever so slightly without her permission, straying somewhere into _not bad, not bad at all, maybe even good._

 

...Somehow, Lance becomes a regular part of daily life after that.

 

(Arguably, the same thing might be said of the other occupants of the castle, given there are only seven of them on board and they see each other day in and day out, but she digresses. There is a fine line between housemate/teammate, and friend whom you relinquish semi-consistent time and attention to, and somehow Lance burrows his way into being both the former and the latter.)

 

He attaches himself to her with vicious, hard-won, blind enthusiasm, much as she has seen him do with Hunk, and despite her hesitations, she lets it happen. There is no Garrison to hide from anymore, no secrets to keep, and having friends here will not risk compromising her cover or intervene with her ability to search for her family.

 

Lance is odd in a very distinct and individual way. He is sharp edges and loud words and all the things that Pidge is not. If her mind is a computer, she thinks, then his is something of a cluttered chess game with loud music blaring in the background.

 

But he is smarter and kinder than she originally gave him credit for, and he accepts all the odd-shaped remnants of her without question, and so he grows on her.

 

He does dumb things (and learns from them, amazingly) and picks fights he can’t win to make himself look cool and robs a space mall fountain with her just to help her buy a video game instead of doing something he fancied instead, and he is…no longer an annoyance or hindrance, but an expectation of fun and excitement.

 

Lance makes no sense in the general order of things, really, because Pidge _is_ decisive, truly and practically. She formulates opinions of people and they do not waver and they do not change, ever, and yet Lance does. He somehow rapidly spirals from problem to acceptable to _friend_ , and Pidge is left floundering in the wake of exactly how this occurred without actually regretting any part of it.

 

And _yet_ even then she cannot close the file. She sits with all the disjointed pieces of Lance and tries to arrange them into a complete human equation and is left with gaps. There is always a persistent feeling of something _missing_ , of knowing it’s there and still not being sure of what, and it leaves her wondering if this is what Lance felt like all the way back in the Garrison, when he looked at her and knew there was _more_ to find but didn’t know what.

 

(Gender and identity and Kerberos and all the little pieces—in retrospect, the fact that Lance even guessed there might have been multiple things she was hiding was pretty impressive, given how much of herself Pidge had tucked away.)

 

“Do you miss not having girl’s stuff? Like…dresses and cheap lip gloss and the ugly hairbands and all that?” he asks her once, long after the video game is bought and the wiring issue is solved, controller tucked in his hands as he squints at the screen, and she blinks and wonders if this is a case of a question being a whim or a long time coming. Maybe both.

 

“Yes and no,” she says, pondering the answer slowly. “I liked some of those things, yeah, but I don’t _need_ them. They were nice when I was younger and first transitioning, because they made me feel more sure of myself, I suppose, but it just…feels different now. I don’t need to look feminine or dress as such to know I’m a woman. I just am.”

 

“Weirdly eloquent response there, Pigeon,” he answers after a long moment, and she blows up his character on the TV screen in retaliation, grinning widely at his loud exclamation following.

 

“Why did you even ask, anyways? It’s a bit of an out-of-nowhere question.”

 

Lance shrugs, nose scrunched up and the first inklings of _uncomfortable_ crawling across his face. “Just thinking.”

 

“...Alright.”

 

“I think I would miss them,” he says loudly. “If I were you. But—y’know—I’m not you so…”

 

Pidge pauses her game and wonders if this is one of those times the ever-expanding folder of Lance needs to be edited upon. “You can tell me anything, you know.” And what a trip that is, to repeat the same words she’d heard her parents say, after Matt had brought her home from that shoe store with those purple Velcro sneakers and had spoken to them unsurely in a low voice as she played with her toy cars spread out over the living room floor, and a million little things had come together for her family to finally make sense of Pidge properly for the first time in her life.

 

She’s probably not the most emotionally competent person for this sort of thing, and definitely isn’t an expert outside of her own experience, but she’s all Lance has got out here, if this is what she thinks it is, so she’ll have to do.

 

“Yeah, I know,” Lance says, not meeting her eyes. “I’m fine, Pidge. It’s nothing.”

 

And she lets it go, because some people are decisive and fast moving and know who they are almost immediately, and others aren’t. Pidge is an early bloomer and a scientist and pragmatic. She knows what she wants out of life and she takes it with as much certainty as she can guarantee.

 

Lance is wide and open and fluid and changeable. He’s the kind of person to demand an audience when he wants to and then duck into the corner to avoid stepping on people’s toes if he deems it necessary.

 

He is not her, and that is fine.

 

It’s a rapid escalation of little things then, once it has her attention. Tiny data points picked up from observation and plugged into the half-finished equation of Lance in the interest of completing the puzzle. A silent pondering of _not like me, very much not like me, but maybe like me yet still_. She knows these signs, can point to them in her own history, but Lance is the anomaly to all her patterns, and it leaves her wondering on the potential surety of her findings.

 

Because Lance is _everything_ —he is loud and brash and boyish, and quiet and thoughtful and mature. He makes terrible, flirty jokes, and then on occasion wrinkles his nose and walks away from the _boy’s talk_. He hangs off Allura like she’s a goddess and then sits and compliments her outfits and offers to do her hair with innocent enthusiasm. He is blurred lines and complexities in so many ways she too was and _is_ , and Pidge isn’t sure he even knows it yet.

 

(Then again, the same things might be said for her. She is a woman in sure identity and mind still living in her little boy disguise that is a stolen mockery of her brother. An example of mind over matter in its finest, the physical losing value in the face of circumstance and confidence in what makes her _herself_.)

 

Lance gets the start of his own _purple shoes moment_ , so to speak, in the inevitableness of the tiny things coming to a head all at once in an unexpected occurrence that seems plain on the surface, much like her own. These aren’t enormous revelations, sweeping statements clawed in panic and triumph (no, those come after). These are the little ticking-over happenings, the quiet, mental, _oh, here we go,_ seeping slowly to the surface.

 

Self-discovery is not fast and dramatic, it is a crawling, sleeping, wondering thing, filled with questions and contemplations long before decisions or revisions, even Pidge knows this much.

 

They end up on a planet, on one of those semi-impromptu departures from the usual Galra-fighting schedule to assist a planet in need with its own problems, with a sacred temple that men are not allowed to enter.

 

(They come across a lot of amazing alien cultures, Pidge will admit, but the matriarchies, even the hyper-religious ones, are pretty damn cool.)

 

It’s a breathless relief, following an unwanted fear that they will somehow burrow their eyes beneath her skin and claim she is not _woman enough,_ when they let her in after Allura without question. She is a woman. She is welcome here, in these alien eyes that hold no concept of human demands that state she is _not quite right_.

 

And then they usher in Lance after them, pulling the temple doors shut on the boys’ confused faces as they lead Lance inside and push him into place with her and Allura, and Pidge is left watching Lance’s wide eyes and wondering if aliens see more than she gives them credit for, after all.

 

Afterwards, when Keith and Hunk knock Lance’s shoulders gently and tease him in good fun about all his beauty regimens making aliens mistake him for a girl, Pidge watches Lance’s unsure grin, his shaking fingers, and keeps her mouth shut.

 

(It is quite possible they saw in Lance what he does not yet see in himself, and this is not her place, to tell Lance’s story for him.)

 

Because the thing about Lance, Pidge thinks, is that he is one of those people who do not know themselves quite yet—who trip over their own insecurities and easily succumb to questionings of their feelings. He is as she is, she suspects, she _knows_ , in the itching feelings of _not quite right, not quite yet, in this thing they call us,_ but otherwise he is nothing like her. Pidge knows her mind, her body, her (albeit likely metaphorical) soul, because in this world where everything is unsure and dangerous, the only thing she can truly rely on once her teammates are gone is herself. Lance is a rapidly spiraling game of impromptu and anomalies, the only file she ever had to completely rewrite, and he is still learning himself as much as she is, if not more.

 

Later, much later, he comes to her room, arms crossed and feet shuffling, and she turns on the video game console without a word, handing him a controller and fighting back a pleased grin as he patiently waits for her to get set up so that she can be player one, as always. He is so much more giving than she ever credited him for, in the beginning, and it is only fair she returns the favor.

 

So she considers it, and she gives him her waiting silence, because a person like Lance just wants a friend, someone willing to hold the pause until they are ready.

 

“...I don’t think I’m a boy,” he says eventually into the steeping silence of the simulated nighttime of the castle, and Pidge pauses the game. “I don’t think I’m like…a _girl_ , either, but—I guess it was always _there_ , y’know? Since I was a kid. It all felt… _off_. But after you, I started thinking about it, and then I couldn’t stop, and…and…”

 

“Alright,” she says, repeating his pointedly simplistic answer from a long time ago, and shrugs, smiling unsurely when he looks to her, which he mirrors.

 

“Yeah?”

 

There are still things to consider after this, so many things. Questions of pronoun experiments and preferences, of terms of address and potential appearance changes desired, of the long discussions she has already been having with Coran about programming the med bay to manufacture the hormone doses she was on before leaving Earth that Lance may now want to be a part of.

 

(...But there is time for all that later.)

 

For now, this is Lance’s beginning moment. His own foray into the first speaking of _it_ as the way he and the world perceive him reorder themselves slowly. He will not suddenly wake up tomorrow and find everything makes sense all at once, but there will be the first prickling of _knowing_ , of awaited change, and that is good.

 

They have time for the logistics, for the science and the decisions and the rewriting. For once in her life, Pidge bids herself patience, to let the both of them figure out the complexities of _being_ in peace.

 

They have all the time in the world. In the _universe_ , even.

 

(Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, in between the bits of _Katie_ and _Pidge_ and _Paladin_ and _Team_ , the file on Lance, idiot and annoyance and friend, rewrites itself slowly once more, filling in the gaps with completed lines of _ah, there it is_.)

 

“...Yeah.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: [pastel-clark](http://www.pastel-clark.tumblr.com)
> 
> Twitter: [hpClarkster](http://www.twitter.com/hpClarkster)


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